This week on the podcast we’re featuring a recent presentation that I gave at the Human Capital Institute conference in San Francisco. It’s all about transforming your company - not with things like new technology or processes or management techniques - but something a lot more fundamental to who we are. Human Connection. As you’ll hear in a minute, I dig into the how and why of creating a NEW type of company - one where the goal is to help people become the best versions of themselves. That means your customers and your employees. (Especially the latter.) I really wanted to share this presentation with you because it contains strategies, tactics, and stories that I haven’t told on this podcast before, but I know you’ll be able to apply at your company.

When we think about training for high performance, we usually think about training our bodies. We might even think about working our craft. But how often do we consider training our emotions? Not very often, right? Well, if we care about performance, that’s actually a huge mistake. That’s a big part of we explore in this episode with Dr. Glenn Fox. Dr. Fox leads program design at USC’s Performance Science Institute, where he works with top athletes to devise strategies that optimize their abilities. He’s an expert on the ways that emotions - particularly gratitude and optimism - drive performance. According to his research, the ability to regulate emotions is the number one predictor of success in life.

Starting a business is hard. Scaling a business is much harder. That’s one of the biggest takeaways from our interview with Brandon Weber, the co-founder and chief product officer of VTS. VTS is the world's leading asset management and leasing platform, transforming an industry that until very recently has resisted the technological innovations that others have embraced. With one foot in computer science and another in real estate, Brandon is the perfect person to bring this stodgy industry into the 21st century. In this interview, Brandon walks us through this journey, including the trials and tribulations of scaling, and tells us why he and his biggest rival ultimately decided to join forces.

We all want to experience success. But how do you get there? Is it a straight line? When do you know to adjust course or make big moves away from your original strategy? This episode will dive into all of this. HUTCH is a Los Angeles company that boasts an innovative product, major funding from marquee investors, and has even appeared on the TV show Shark Tank. If you weren’t paying attention, Hutch might look like an overnight success. But when you dig a littler deeper, the real story is much more complicated.